The people have an insatiable appetite for digital distraction. Social media platforms, video “tube” platforms, and other content providers serve digital content to hundreds of millions of users each day, including social media posts, video clips, images, animations, text, and music files. These content delivery systems follow the basic business model of aggregating huge amounts of content, serving that content to users, and monetizing the users' interactions with the platform. Accordingly, the prior art content delivery systems employ what can be described as a “browsing experience.” Individual content items are served along with advertisements, links, and the option to scroll through or link to an unlimited stream of additional content. The entire experience is designed to capture the attention of the user for an extended period of time in order to increase revenue generation for the platform.
In some cases, the user may prefer a less disruptive experience, for example a metered and ephemeral media presentation. Ephemeral media presentations are known in the prior art, in the form of pop-up advertisements, for example, which users are compelled to watch before accessing requested content. However, the user does not control the playback or content of pop-up advertising.
In some cases, the user may desire a discovery experience, wherein they are exposed to novel content matched to their tastes. Internet radio provides such an experience, however it limited to the delivery of music files. Limited discovery functions are enabled in prior art visual content delivery systems, for example in the form of links to suggested content that are presented to the user based on the user's past viewing history. However, such platforms are browser platforms and do not provide a quick, clean, metered, and unobtrusive viewing experience.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for novel methods of accessing content, delivering content, and for systems to effectively deliver media files to users in a metered, ephemeral presentation.